Sunday, March 25, 2012

Nor is it true that Britain has record public debts. It did have a record annual public deficit in 2009/10 as the budget papers say. But that is not debt. Debt is an aggregate figure, the consequence of cumulative deficits over decades. Expressed as a proportion of GDP, debt has been higher than current levels for most of the last 250 years. Indeed, with the cost of servicing public debt at the lowest since the 1890s there have been very few decades since the 1760s when the cost of servicing public debt has been so low. Britain, despite the Orwellian attempt to misuse language, does not have a debt crisis.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Ward is, of course, the guy who invented the original wiki and is someone renowned for being extremely insightful in a low key kind of a way. With his new project, the Smallest Federated Wiki he's reinventing wiki for an age of mobile devices and rich browsers. Where each of us has our own wiki (as we have our own blog) but want to to share data between them, through a voluntary "pull" pattern closer to distributed source control managers such as git. And a world where we want wiki to act as a dashboard to an array of servers, sensors and data-streams.

This is an exciting, forward-looking vision of wiki, and I've completely re-oriented my thinking around it. I've now ported ThoughtStorms wiki across to the new engine, bringing it into the federation. I'll be doing the same with my other wikis. And I've decided that this is now the future of SdiDesk. I'll be writing converters for SdiDesk pages and SFW-plugins to handle the network diagramming etc. aspects.

This is exciting. Even seeing ThoughtStorms in the new format (where drag-and-drop refactoring is extremely easy) inspires me to start tidying it up with re-writes, purges of dead-links and other outdated material. That's not going to happen overnight, it happens at the organic rate of wiki's life, death, composting and rebirth, but this spring ThoughtStorms is definitely recovering from its recent hibernation. And I hope we'll soon see SdiDesk throwing up new shoots.

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Seriously. Why has misogyny become one of THE political campaigning issues of current times?

One of the few shreds of legitimate criticism that Westerners have made of Middle-Eastern and Islamic cultures over the last 10 years, is of the status and treatment of women in those societies. And yet, right-wing conservatives in the West seem hell-bent on rivalling that. ???